We liked her back when only Lex liked her…

[Video][Website]
[6.50]

Alfred Soto: As much as Michelle honors the Chi-Lites sample with a full-throated delivery — when she descends for minor key melismatics she’s a wonder — the song’s relentlessness proves resistable after a couple of minutes. Still… still… she’s so there that airplay should take care of these cavils.
[7]

Brad Shoup: Just Blaze emphasized Eugene Record’s strings for “December 4th”; they functioned like the wavy lines that once signified flashbacks on TV shows. Pop & Oak push out one-note brass blat (later mirrored by left-hand piano chords, then bass throb) into which K. Michelle digs her heels. She growls, she beckons, she swings between two notes like a gymnast on the uneven bars. On the chorus in particular, it really sounds like everything. Rewrite the stumbling bridge and we’d have a perfect single.
[8]

Scott Mildenhall: The backing and the interpolation are sample gold, but it’s odd that one of the introductions of modernity to them is the robotic nature of K. Michelle’s vocals; she seems to be pulling out some very unnatural melisma. As a result it jars where it could glide, not really doing justice to Debra Laws, or likely even Michelle herself.
[6]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: “VERY SPECIAL!” Okay, you’re overselling the product now.
[5]

Sonya Nicholson: The strings sound like they belong on a Hitchcock soundtrack but the lyrics are 100% of the “let’s make sure this is commercially viable” school of songwriting. K Michelle comes close to a standard power-diva vocal except that she’s a little too forceful and the look in her eyes is a little too wild (in the music video). I hate to admit this, but when I heard this song on the radio I took it at face value as hackwork. I like to think that if I’d stuck with it until the bridge (“I shouldn’t be with you, that’s what everybody says”) I’d have cottoned on to the implicit critique. Knowing it’s there, I’m digging how Michelle’s voice goes a little wild and desperate at the end of some lines, after being so controlled in the chorus. It’s a very good thing that she’s on this — without her great and subtle vocal performance this would be mostly just a clever idea.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: “Ain’t an ordinary,” “so much history,” this does read like it was written by an advertising executive for a certain alcoholic drink. Fortunately, it’s not sung like it. This is a genuine onslaught.
[7]